Attention to the Unseen

Wired reports: As the Trump administration publicly cast Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua (TdA) as a unified terrorist force tied to President Nicolás Maduro and operating inside the United States, hundreds of internal US government records obtained by WIRED tell a far less certain story. Intelligence taskings, law-enforcement bulletins, and drug-task-force assessments show that agencies spent much of 2025 struggling to determine whether TdA even functioned as an organized entity in the US at all—let alone as a coordinated national security…

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Ken Klippenstein reports: In the wake of an ICE officer’s killing of Renee Good, the Department of Homeland Security is rolling out “Operation Metro Surge,” flooding Minneapolis with hundreds of additional federal agents — only to realize it doesn’t actually have the confidence to match the bravado. While homeland secretary Kristi Noem and others in the administration preen about justifying last week’s shooting and trumpet their war on “domestic terrorism,” DHS is privately divided and hesitant about the latest deployments….

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The Daily Beast reports: Sensitive details of around 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol employees—including almost 2,000 agents working in frontline enforcement—have allegedly been released by a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower following last week’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good. The Jan. 7 killing of the mother by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has sparked nationwide protests and worldwide outrage, including among some DHS employees. The alleged leak to ICE List, a self-styled “accountability initiative,” is believed to…

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In These Times reports: Unions and community groups gathered in front of the Hennepin County Government Center in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota this morning to announce a day of ​“no work, no school, no shopping” on January 23 to oppose the ferocious assault on the state by federal immigration authorities. “We are facing a tsunami of hate from our own federal government,” Abdikarim Khasim, a Minnesota rideshare driver, told the crowd. ​“We’re going to shut it down on the 23rd. We’re…

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By Nicole Foy and McKenzie Funk This story was originally published by ProPublica Immigration agents have put civilians’ lives at risk using more than their guns. An agent in Houston put a teenage citizen into a chokehold, wrapping his arm around the boy’s neck, choking him so hard that his neck had red welts hours later. A black-masked agent in Los Angeles pressed his knee into a woman’s neck while she was handcuffed; she then appeared to pass out. An…

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Elizabeth Tsurkov writes: Four men searched my mouth for implanted tracking devices. I had told them I didn’t have any—that, as far as I knew, such things existed only in movies. They asked if I had fillings, and I confessed that I did. They looked again. “No, you don’t,” one of them corrected me, having failed to find any glint of silver. My fillings are white. The men, wearing dark civilian clothes and balaclavas, seemed convinced that these unfamiliar fillings…

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  The transformation of ICE into a type of national police force, backed, in some cases, by soldiers from the National Guard, has been covered as immigration story—but these forces are reshaping democracy for all of us. This shift was evident even before the shootings in Minneapolis and Portland this week.

Adam Serwer writes: There’s a lot we don’t know about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed yesterday by federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota. But in the chaotic aftermath of the shooting, one thing became immediately clear: The Trump administration was lying about what happened. Shortly after news began circulating about the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement on X that “rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these…

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  NYT: An analysis of footage from three camera angles shows that the motorist was driving away from — not toward — a federal officer when he opened fire. The Washington Post reports: Thousands of people in Minneapolis gathered for a candlelight vigil Wednesday evening to mourn and protest the killing of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE officer in the city hours earlier as she appeared to try to drive away in her vehicle…

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Jan-Werner Müller writes: When a bleary-eyed Trump explained the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro this past Saturday, he invoked the Monroe doctrine: while the US president sounded like he was reading about it for the first time, historians of course recognized the idea of Washington as a kind of guardian of the western hemisphere. Together with the national security strategy published in December, the move on Venezuela can be understood as advancing a vision for carving up the world into what…

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Politico reports: Federal judges are increasingly exasperated by the Trump administration’s effort to lock up nearly everyone facing deportation proceedings — a draconian expansion of decades-old policies that hundreds of courts have rejected as illegal or unconstitutional. More than 300 federal judges, including appointees of every president since Ronald Reagan, have now rebuffed the administration’s six-month-old effort to expand its so-called “mandatory detention” policy, according to a POLITICO analysis of court dockets from across the country. Those judges have ordered…

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